Due to the rapid development of technology, people nowadays tend to use electronic devices (e.g. computers, digital cameras, etc.) to record various kinds of information. In the meantime, with the emergence of different types of data storage media (e.g. external portable hard drives, universal serial bus (USB) drives, storage servers, etc.), people can copy and/or make backups of electronic objects (e.g. files, folders, etc.) easily.
From the viewpoint of enterprises, electronic objects created and received by employees of an enterprise are intellectual property of this enterprise. Hence, the easier that an electronic object can be copied and/or be made backups, the higher possibility that intellectual property of enterprises will be leaked out. To secure intellectual property, technologies such as remote desktop services, web-based editing tools, and digital right management have been developed. Each of these technologies is briefly discussed below.
Regarding the technology of remote desktop services, a remote desktop client application has to be installed on a client device. On the client device, a user can view or even control the desktop session on another remote machine, where the remote desktop server is running. A remote desktop service provides a secure environment, where is capable for almost all applications and corresponding functions by a network control session manner. However, remote desktop services are protocol dependent, and they may have poor performance and heavily consume network bandwidth. When the network is congested, the performance of a remote desktop service will be degraded dramatically. Regarding web-based editing tools, they support fewer data types and have fewer functions comparing to legacy editing tools. As to digital right management (DRM) used by Apple's iTunes store, Google's Play store, etc., only true closed platform can protect electronic objects and resources, but users may resistant in using such kinds of DRM technologies when control policies of true closed platforms hurting conveniences of using the DRM protected applications.
According to the above descriptions, technologies such as remote desktop services, web-based editing tools, and digital right management all have shortcomings and cannot be adapted to the context that a client device is placed. Therefore, technologies that are context aware and that can easily copy and/or make backups of electronic files as well as secure intellectual property are still in an urgent need.